Courtesy PhotoGrandville attorney Shawn James Haff is named in a federal lawsuit filed against Cooley Law School.

GRAND RAPIDS – Either law school students are the victims of an elaborate scheme to bilk them out of $100,000 for tuition and leave them with dim job prospects or they are self-entitled elitists who think they are guaranteed a job because they have a juris doctorate.

Four graduates of Thomas M. Cooley Law School have brought a federal lawsuit against their alma mater, claiming the school misrepresented its post-graduation employment statistics to attract students.

Among those named as plaintiffs is Grandville attorney Shawn James Haff. Haff is a 1993 graduate of Hudsonville High School and then attended Grand Valley State University before getting his law degree from Cooley.

Cooley is based in Lansing but has a campus in Grand Rapids.

The suit claims that after his graduation, Haff was forced to take temporary contract assignments reviewing documents in order to make ends meet and pay off a massive student loan totaling “tens of thousands of dollars.”

New York law firm Kurzon Strauss filed the suit this week in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan in Grand Rapids, claiming Cooley counts part-time jobs -- or employment other than working full-time as lawyer -- in its job statistics.

The suit accuses Cooley of using “Enron-style” accounting techniques that would “leave most for-profit companies facing the long barrel of a government investigation.”

Kurzon Strauss attorney and University of Michigan Law School graduate David Anziska said while Cooley claims that 75 to 80 percent of graduates get jobs within nine months of graduation, his firm believes that number is less than 30 percent.

“The dirty little secret is that this is a common practice among law schools,” said Anziska, who adds that a nearly identical suit has been filed against the New York Law School.

Anziska describes Cooley and NY Law School as law degree factories and the real problem is with the way that law schools report their employment and salary information as a matter of course.

He says the American Bar Association needs to control the kind of information that law schools disseminate to perspective students.

“No one is allowed to lie about their products,” said Anziska, pointing out that many who pass the bar exam end up taking jobs as document reviewers or part-time paralegals and find themselves struggling mightily to pay back six-figure tuition bills and student loans.

“When you think lawyer, you think rich and that's just not true,” Anziska said. However, the suit points out that Cooley dean Don LeDuc earns “a staggering $548,047” and school founder and former State Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Brennan earns $370,000.

James Thelen, Cooley's associate dean for legal affairs and general counsel, said the school stands by its post-graduation employment and salary statistics.

He said the school has acted according to the dictates of the bar association and if there is a change in the way that data reporting is done by the nation's 200 ABA-approved law schools, Cooley will abide by those changes.

However, he said no college degree, including a juris doctorate, is a guarantee of employment.

“It's absurd that someone would come from our school three years ago, see our 76 percent employment rate and somehow say they were promised a job,” said Thelen. “Unemployment is bad for everyone right now.”

Henderson said the ABA does not require any deep data on what the graduates are doing, only that they are employed after nine months. He said if a law school provides negative data, it could impact their ranking on the U.S. News and World Report ranking which has somehow become widely influential.

“I'm pretty confident that the American Bar Association is going to step in and make this right,” Henderson said. He said the ABA began the process before any suits were filed, but the implementation has not occurred.

But Henderson said all the data in the world could have a limited impact on young people whose ideas of the lawyer lifestyle is shaped by popular culture.

He said while for many years lawyers were insulated against job loss, that has changed in the past few years as the number of law school gradutes continues to grow while jobs available has flat-lined.

“For lawyers, this is new and uncomfortable,” he said.

Earlier this year, Cooley sued the law firm, claiming it was defaming the school in on-line ads seeking potential plaintiffs who attended Cooley.

The firm maintains that Cooley was trying to intimidate the firm. Cooley plans to move forward with its own lawsuit.

The federal suit asks for $250 million in damages including the reimbursement of students' tuition and other damages and it also demands that the named schools have their employment data checked by independent audit.

Cooley has about 1,000 graduates a year and about 4,000 students enrolled, with campuses in Lansing, Ann Arbor, Auburn Hills and Grand Rapids and plans to open a fifth in Tampa Bay, Florida.